Abstract

We show that the optical properties of a metal-nonlinear dielectricgrating can be precisely described by a uniform nonlinear dielectric slab. Based upon such a metamaterial mapping, we show that the effective optical nonlinearity in a metal-dielectric grating can be enhanced by orders of magnitude higher than that of the underlying nonlinear dielectric material, is broadband, and can be operated at a low quality-factor regime so as to have an extremely short intrinsic temporal response of a few picoseconds. Furthermore, we demonstrate extraordinary harmonic generation efficiency enhancement and large threshold-power reduction in bistability.

Received 09 September 2012Accepted 02 January 2013Published online 16 January 2013

Acknowledgments:

The authors acknowledge informative discussions with L. Wang and W. Pickard. The computations were performed at the Rosen Center for Advanced Computing at Purdue University through the support of the National Science Foundation XSEDE program.